Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: What Happens When Government Lies Are Exposed?

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Ray McGovern: What Happens When Government Lies Are Exposed?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, December 11, 2023. Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time. Do you sense a general realization among Western elites, except for Joe Biden and Lincoln and the White House and the State Department, that the war in Ukraine is over and Ukraine can go nowhere? Except for the people in London, yes. There's a wide recognition that far from what Biden said two months ago, that Russia has already lost. It's just the other way around.

It got mixed up, okay? Russia had already won. Now the question is, what is he going to tell Zelensky on Wednesday? My God, you know, why would he want Zelensky coming in to talk to him, tête-à-tête? I fear, I fear the worst. These guys are in real trouble. What kind of deus ex machina, what kind of special surprise,

special false flag operation are they planning? I mean, that's the only thing that makes sense for them to meet. So, yeah, I'm really worried because as all these other leaders watch on, they also see that Biden and his coterie of sophomores have a lot of stake in this, not least of all the election and the notion that Trump might win and put them all in prison. I do not exaggerate. When you look at what the Department of Justice has done to this 53-page indictment, the most recent one on Hunter Biden, it bends over backwards not to mention who his father is and what role he plays. It's really ridiculous. Well, you know, Zelensky is coming Wednesday. He is not going to

address a joint session of Congress. He's going to do something that to me is unheard of. I'm not a congressional historian. He's addressing the Senate. So Chuck Schumer, the majority leader of the Senate, invited him to address the Senate, not a joint session of Congress, not the House of Representatives, just the Senate. I think Joe knows that he's in trouble domestically, politically. The Senate last week blocked an effort to even consider the $68 billion he wants to send to Ukraine. Mike Johnson, though, probably cut a compromise. That's all he's been doing since he became Speaker of the House. At this point, he's not even going to let the Ukraine thing come to the floor of the House because the overwhelming majority of the Republican caucus is against it. So Zelensky is coming with a tin cup in his hand. Secretary

Austin announced another drawdown. Chris, I think we have that clip, don't we? I think it's number six. To support Ukraine's immediate needs, I am announcing our 50-second drawdown of equipment and services from U.S. stocks. This package includes additional munitions for air defense, artillery and tank weapons, and small arms munition. Now, at today's important defense industrial base summit, we discuss ways to strengthen partnerships among Ukraine and the U.S. defense industry. And all this just underscores America's commitment to a free and sovereign Ukraine. Spoken like a good once-and-future board member of Raytheon, he might as well have called that summit the military-industrial complex. You remember how those drawdowns work.

Mrs. Pelosi and company gave Joe Biden $113 billion. He spends it in chunks. They don't tell us how much because they don't keep an accurate record. The Defense Department once admitted, you remember this, it was off by $6 billion. But another drawdown is coming from that. And then, of course, there's this gem, cut five. policies. If Putin takes Ukraine, he won't stop there. It's important to see the long run here. He's going to keep going. He's made that pretty clear. If Putin attacks a NATO ally, then we'll have something that we don't seek and that we don't have today. American troops fighting Russian troops. American troops fighting Russian troops if he moves into other parts of NATO it's really a president of the United States I think Ray and of course I want your views on this at the end of his line politically suggesting that we don't give another 68 billion to Ukraine

somehow American troops uh will be involved where do you see this going? Well, when you look at more enlightened people, now, J.D. Vance is not my favorite senator, but here's an example of the kind of opposition that Chuck Schumer faces and why he's trying to get Zelensky to turn these guys around. J.G. Vance talking with Jake Tapper on CNN. We'll run the clip in a minute, but go ahead. You can give your view. He's saying this is his word preposterous.

It's preposterous to think that Russia, not the Soviet Union, but Russia wants to take over the rest of Western Europe. There's no evidence of it. And when they went into Ukraine, it was very, very small, 90,000 guys. You don't take over even much of Ukraine with those people.

So one thing that I like to adduce, it makes sense to me, maybe it makes sense to this audience. But, you know, what about 155 millimeter shells? Standard for tanks, for artillery, for everything. You know, if there were a Russian threat to Western Europe or to Europe, wouldn't you think they would have the standard ammunition in stock? So they didn't have the standard, they don't still have the standard ammunition in stock. So that means either they didn't think Russia was a threat all during that time from the 22 years that Putin has been in power through the coup d'etat in Kiev in 2014, they still don't have those shells. So one of two conclusions. One is they don't really think Russia is a threat.

Or number two, they're totally incompetent. And that's possible too. You know, in the interview with my friend Jake Tapper, J.D. Vance, and I don't agree with everything he says. I don't even agree with everything he says in the interview. But he does make some very interesting points. Are Paris and Berlin really worried about Putin? Of course not.

Has Putin even hinted that he's going to go beyond Ukraine? Absolutely not. Does he want to take over Ukraine? No. Does he want to take over Ukraine? No. Does he want to govern Ukraine? No. He just wants NATO out of Ukraine. Here's the clip of Senator Vance, and you're right. This is the type of opposition amongst Republicans and maybe amongst a few sensible Democrats, I don't know, that Chuck Schumer faces. In order for the Senate to give this money, they have to suspend their rules because Joe wants the money before Christmas. It's only two weeks to Christmas. In order to

suspend the rules, they need a two-thirds vote. That's 67 senators. When they took the vote to suspend the rules last week, it was 51 in favor, 49 against. All the Democrats in favor, all of the Republicans against. Here's Vance explaining the view of himself and many Republicans. So there's two reasons I don't buy this. First of all, Putin has showed he's much weaker than a lot of people feared. The Ukrainians have fought bravely. They've also stalled Putin at a very small amount of territorial gain relative to the entire country. The idea that he can march to Poland or Berlin is preposterous. And the other thing that this really misses here is we have to remember our NATO allies, with the exception of a few Eastern

Europeans, are not carrying their fair share of the burden. Most of them don't even spend 2% of their GDP on defense. If Putin is a threat to Berlin, that means the Germans should be changing something about their defense policy. It doesn't mean we can write indefinite checks to Ukraine. on defense. If Putin is a threat to Berlin, that means the Germans should be changing something about their defense policy. It doesn't mean we can write indefinite checks to Ukraine. Right. But Russia has been proven to be something of a paper tiger because the U.S. has been helping Ukraine, right? I mean, that's the reason. Well, it's also because, of course, the Ukrainians have fought very bravely. I think it's also because, look, you cannot occupy an entire territory the size of Ukraine with the amount of troops that Russia has.

The idea that you can go even further and control multiple European nations is, I think, a scare tactic to get people distracted from the fact that our Ukraine policy just doesn't make a ton of sense. I listened to Secretary Blinken. What are we trying to do, Jake? What is the end goal here? How long does this go? Until the president can articulate the answer to those questions, I don't know why we would

write another blank check. Well, to start where he ends, they can't articulate an end goal. At one point, Mrs. Nuland's end goal was to use Ukraine as a battering ram to drive Putin from office. But the economic sanctions have made Russia stronger and more economically independent. And President Putin's approval ratings are between 82 and 86 percent, almost the inverse of old Joe's, which are in the low 30s or high 20s. I'll let you take that ball and run with it, Ray. Well, on the economic front, the IMF and the West decided that Russia would suffer a two percentage reduction in GDP. It turned out there were four and a half points off. Russia has got two and a half increase in GDP. So those were the sanctions. The rest of the stuff was just crazy. These people don't know what they're doing. And when Putin parades around exuding self-confidence

and saying, yeah, I guess I'll run again. And he's got six more years, maybe 12 more years, for God's sake. Well, yeah, he's filling his oats, but he's got to worry about what these guys are going to do. If they go to cluster bombs, if they go to depleted uranium shells, what might they do next to prevent, defeat, defeat the election, and maybe imprisonment under this new guy that might come in next November. Chris, let's run the clip of President Putin talking about, the one I have to narrate, how strong Russia is and how weak Ukraine is, even with American assistance. Our defense plants are working more and more competently. Our industry is gaining momentum.

We've started producing several times more. I know that we still don't have enough. Ukraine is running out of weapons. They don't have their own foundations. When you don't have your own foundations, you don't have your own ideology, you don't have your own industry, you don't have your own money. You don't have anything that's your own. You don't have a future. We have a future. I mean, he's right on the mark, and he sees that the NATO has effectively been defeated

by Russia via the proxy war in Ukraine. Nobody really can take a position other than that, except for the fanatics in the Biden administration. Look at this. Here he is when he visited. I'll show you from the beginning. President Putin visiting President Abbas, and the cap of one of the military honor guard falls off and President Putin stoops to pick it up. I don't think I've ever seen this before. Look for that cap on eBay soon, Ray McGovern. All right, we're going to take a break to pay some bills. When we come back, we're going to switch to Israel, how the IDF in Gaza is arresting civilian males, stripping them down to their underwear, parading them around and claiming that they are captured Hamas fighters, all in direct and profound violation of the Geneva Conventions, but first this.

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Is Israel continuing to lose the PR war, not only in the region, but internationally? Yes, for sure. And Putin is filling the gap. He's winning. You know, he's talked with the heads of Saudi Arabia, of Iran, of Turkey, three key countries in this mix. He's filling his oats, as you could see there, with the honor guard. The honor guard's fellow had lost his hat.

Bad, bad, right? So he picks up the hat, puts it on, and he says, it's all right. It's all right. So my problem is he's feeling very ebullient and he wants to be in a position to maybe even mediate what happens there in Gaza. I don't know if that's going to work, but they're in trouble there because, well, I think probably tomorrow the General Assembly takes up the same kind of resolution that the U.S. vetoed just last Thursday or Friday. So, yeah, they're isolated. And when you talk about Russia being isolated, well, it's just the other way around.

Just the other way around, as it is the other way around on Russia losing in Ukraine. Right. The other way around. Well, we were live on air with Matt Ho on Friday when you reported on the results of that vote at the Security Council. We now know that it was 13 to 1 to 1, 13 in favor of a ceasefire, one against, which is effectively a veto, the United States, and then Great Britain just going along as the Brits have more or less been a poodle to whoever's in the White House. Here is the United States deputy ambassador to the UN explaining the United States veto,

followed by three comments by Arab officials who happened to be in D.C. at the time. Although the United States strongly supports a durable peace in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security, we do not support this resolution's call for an unsustainable ceasefire that will only plant the seeds for the next war. We believe there is a moral obligation toward the international community to stop the killing of the Palestinian civilians. And it's the first time, at least in my lifetime, that I have seen that calling for a ceasefire became a controversial issue. I'm not sure how deep is the

understanding here of what's happening on the ground in Gaza. I mean this war has broken every record. Largest number of journalists killed, largest number of hospitals destroyed, largest number of medics killed largest number of u.n employees killed our message has been very clear there needs to be an immediate ceasefire there needs to be a cessation of hostilities and we need to have immediate access for humanitarian aid it is not acceptable where do you think this is going to go, Ray? Our friend and colleague Alistair Crook thinks it's eventually going to lead to a regional military conflagration. Well, I bow to Alistair, but I think that can be avoided. And I think the top leaders in that area are doing their best bending over backwards to avoid it.

There are economic measures they can take. I would expect them to do those first. The oil embargo, well, that won't hurt the U.S. so much now, but it will really, really hurt Western Europe. The Houthis saying no Israeli vessels can, or people delivering things to Israel could come through the Red Sea. Those are big things. What really worries me is the cynical use of the most potent arrow in the quiver of propaganda or covert action, and that is accusing somebody of rape. Okay?

Now, all the major media are full of these stories about rape in Gaza, rape when Hamas went into Israel. There is no evidence to support that. What they have is Israeli reports. And so what's the problem here? Well, the problem is the American people are being subjected still to this drivel, this propaganda, which would make them inclined to support anything Biden wanted to do because they're not going to get a straight story on this. This has to change. It's changing abroad because of all these iPhones. Will it change in the United States soon enough to prevent Biden from doing really something really stupid stupider I don't know so the Israelis um claim that they have um uh arrested IDF excuse me they have arrested Hamas fighters who threw their weapons down um the uh Gazans say these are not

Hamas fighters these are civilians who've been kidnapped, stripped down to their underwear and paraded around on Israeli cameras and expressed violation. Well, the kidnapping is a violation of the Geneva Convention. So the occupier can't kidnap and the parading is a violation. This morning I asked earlier today I asked Alistair Crook about it. So we have juxtaposed Alistair's comments on this with background footage, what we call B-roll, of these unfortunate guys being shown on camera in their underwear. They're a little blurred. It's not lurid. It looks like they're wearing bathing suits. But it's a war crime. Take a look. It's becoming quite clear that actually Hamas is not being defeated. I mean, when you see Israel rounding up a whole lot of civilians from a local shelter in their underwear and then filming them and say they're sort of seized Hamas prisoners, you realize that Israel is having to try and find ways of convincing its public that this exercise has been a success.

I don't think they have even touched the main force of Hamas, which is underground still. They've just managed to treat it a little bit at the edges, but not the main part of it. And at the same time, they've destroyed their image in the world overall completely. But Biden is committed to giving them as much time as possible to try and destroy Hamas. But meanwhile, as I say, I think Hamas understood this. They are able to last much longer than perhaps Biden or netniahu is on in this fight and then I think that they expect that Israel will go for Hezbollah and that will mean we will move up the ladder of escalation to the next level interesting observation that Hamas will be around longer than Biden or Netanyahu.

Why is there no outrage at this? You expressed profound outrage. We ran the clip over and over over the weekend. Why aren't people in the State Department resigning and publishing the documents, showing, demonstrating United States duplicity in Ukraine and in Israel. But there would be outrage anywhere else in the world of any other country. If Putin stripped down Ukrainian prisoners to their underwear and took pictures of them, there'd be outrage. That would be different because he wants to take over Europe. I make a joke. Of course.

I mean, the problem is, look, I'm around long enough to remember photos of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Dachau, and those photos are very reminiscent of what happened then, okay? So, never again, except for the Israelis. They can do never again, what happened to them. Now, these photos are going viral around the rest of the world. You don't see them on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post. There have been some little improvement in that, but that hasn't happened yet. So it's really up to us.

We are enabling all this stuff. We have to tell our representatives, our senators, and anybody else who has any power at all, look, that's enough is enough. Never again means never again for everyone, especially and especially for people who have suffered never

again. Over the weekend, the Biden administration, bypassing Congress, sent 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition and another 106 million in tanks and tank spare parts to Israel, bypassing Congress using emergency legislation enacted at the time of World War II. The purpose of the emergency legislation is to defend the national security of the United States of America. So in order to bypass Congress, it was necessary for Secretary of Blinken to sign a document under oath that whatever he was bypassing Congress on was necessary to support the national security of the United States. Is it even conceivable how giving this money to Israel, bypassing Congress, bypassing the Constitution, bypassing federal law, is necessary for the security of the United States?

It's not conceivable. It is conceivable if Biden thinks this is necessary for him to win the election or the people around him think that's the case. It's so politically cynical. I mean, let's face it, there is appreciable Zionist influence in the press, in the Congress, and among the chief lieutenants, all of whom, all of whom, except maybe General Austin, are self-confessed, the self-recognized Zionists, okay? And Zionists are not Jews, okay? Zionists take over other countries like what happened in 1948, and no one has made them pay a price for that. The price is coming now. It's just that the U.S. is the main stumbling block.

We'll see what happens in the General Assembly tomorrow. Today, my colleague and good friend Anne Wright is appearing before the Security Council at about three o'clock, and she's going to talk about her experience with arms transfers into areas where conflict has begun. Tune in. It's going to be really good, 15 minutes. Ray McGovern, always a pleasure, my dear friend. We'll see you at the end of the week with Larry Johnson for our Intel Roundtable. Thank you for your thoughts, and thank you for your foresight on all of this. Most welcome. Of course. Coming up at three o'clock this afternoon, Eastern Time, the aforestated Larry Johnson, and at five o'clock, Eastern, Max Blumenthal. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.